Quentin Tarantino’s male gaze in 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood' isn’t just insulting – it’s profoundly boring

Warning: the piece below contains spoilers for ‘Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood’.

Towards the end of Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, a narrator informs us that the blistering August heat has left Sharon Tate feeling “especially pregnant in all the worst ways”. It’s unclear exactly what Quentin Tarantino means by that (is Tate feeling big? Bloated? Sweaty? Heavy?), yet this acknowledgement of Tate’s “pregnancy-induced melancholy” is the first hint that the actor might be treated like a fully fledged character after all, as opposed to the hazy, sexy fever dream she’s reduced to for most of the film’s two hours and 41 minutes.

It is a well-known fact by now that Margot Robbie, who plays Tate, has a ludicrously scant number of lines in Tarantino’s film. She does, however, have a good amount of screen time, which is filled with sequences of Tate dancing, laughing, talking, holding hands with her husband Roman Polanski, and in one instance, going to the cinema.

This version of Tate, to be clear, is not a character. She doesn’t change. She doesn’t experience any kind of personal growth. (Granted, a lot of us don’t experience personal change on a daily basis, but that’s a luxury characters in works of fiction cannot be afforded. Watching people just live is boring, even in a Tarantino movie. Even reality TV, the medium that most frequently purports to let us watch people “just live”, heavily resorts to storytelling techniques to keep us hooked.)​

Instead, Tarantino’s Tate is a presence – a luminous, kind, generous angel of a woman whose heart seems wide open to the world. It’s a flattering depiction, for sure, but it’s also terribly reductive – and as a result, Tarantino’s film is just plain dull. What could have been an ambitious, insightful-yet-goofy take on late-Sixties Hollywood, the Manson Family murders, and the end of innocence ends up a male-gazey mess that suggests Tarantino – the same director who brought us The Bride, certainly the best female character on the Tarantino scale – is losing his touch.

When confronted with his decision to give Robbie just a scarce few lines, Tarantino famously told the female journalist who raised the issue at the Cannes Film Festival, “I reject your hypothesis.” It’s worth pointing out that “You didn’t give Margot Robbie many lines” isn’t a hypothesis; it’s an assessment and, as anyone who has seen the movie can attest, a regrettable fact.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood has been out since 26 July in the US, where I live. In that time, some have found ways to make sense of Tate’s relative mutism in the film. Tarantino (who was six years old when Tate was murdered) is writing a love letter to the Los Angeles of his childhood. Tate – his version of Tate – is an element in the picture he’s painting. Tarantino said it himself, telling Deadline: “I thought it would both be touching and pleasurable and also sad and melancholy to just spend a little time with her, just existing. I didn’t come up with a big story and have her work into the story so now she has to talk to other characters and move a story along. It was just a day in the life.”​

When researching Tate and her life, Tarantino became “very enamoured” with her, he told Entertainment Weekly. But just because a portrayal is motivated by love – a very specific kind of love that only lets you exist within the boundary of someone else’s vision of you – doesn’t mean it’s kind. And it certainly doesn’t mean it’s fair. In this case, the treatment of Tate seems like a vast missed opportunity to tell the story of a multi-faceted woman. That Tarantino manages to reduce Tate – a talented actress, a woman who battled to be known for something beyond her good looks, a mass murder victim, the spouse of a man who would later plead guilty to unlawful sex with a minor and flee to Europe – to a lifeless, perpetually cheerful doll is a feat of the saddest kind.

Yes, Tarantino does acknowledge Tate’s acting talents to some extent. When he shows her going to the cinema to watch one of her own films, The Wrecking Crew, footage of the movie plays in the background, showing Tate in all her klutzy glory as the bumbling Freya Carlson. This specific sequence, in which Robbie is, by the way, excellent, appears to have struck a particular chord with viewers, for understandable reasons. There’s something deeply touching about Robbie’s portrayal of Tate’s delight when she hears the audience laugh at Carlson’s antics, and of her trepidation when one of her fight scenes plays on the big screen.

But as far as the rest of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is concerned, Tate recedes into the background. She’s a wife, a party girl, a welcoming neighbour, a pair of arms awaiting eagerly to pull the whole world into one big mothering hug. She’s one-dimensional. She’s not a character. She’s a version of femininity that those who have never experienced womanhood want to believe in.

This seems all the more unfair given that the movie’s two main characters, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, are given plenty to work with. Sure, they’re cartoonish in that Tarantino kind of way, but they’re also interesting. On the surface, Dalton is a ridiculous, down-on-his-luck Western actor with a drinking problem and a propensity for outbursts. But over the course of the film, he experiences crippling self-doubt, picks himself up only to fall again, travels to Italy and gets married, which in turn impacts on his friendship with Booth. Booth, meanwhile, finds ways to remain in Dalton’s life even when he’s not needed as a stunt double, pays a tense visit to the Manson Family ranch, and his interactions with a young cult member afford him a surprising amount of character depth (let’s just say, I didn’t think Booth was the type to turn down the advances of a beautiful, young hitch-hiker, but Booth, unlike Tate, is awarded the luxury of being full of surprises).

Robbie, it should be noted, does a brilliant job at working with what Tarantino gave her, which in this case is not much. Tate’s sister Debra told Vanity Fair the actor left her in tears during a visit on set “because she sounded just like Sharon”. The problem is that having a character such as Tate in the background doesn’t work, simply because Tate was never meant to be in the background. Someone of her magnitude demands to be front and centre, but Tarantino wasn’t interested in telling that story. Instead, he demands we focus our attention not on the woman with a true, heart-wrenching background, but on a pair of fictional guys who wouldn’t hold our attention for more than a minute if they weren’t played by charismatic actors such as Pitt and DiCaprio.

The result is a film that never quite figures out what it’s trying to say. Its first half lingers; the Western scenes are, I’m sorry to point out, far too long, and the whole movie feels self-indulgent. We’re taken on a nostalgic ride, but we never get to the core of what, exactly, we’re supposed to feel nostalgic about. Tarantino seems to revel in his own directing, which would be fine (his directing can be so very enjoyable when done right) if the movie didn’t overly rely on aesthetics to the detriment of substance. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, in that regard, seems to be part of a growing trend to which Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman could be an unfortunate addition – a trend that sees filmmakers such as Tarantino and Scorsese reviving and heightening their own signature brands, sometimes to the point of caricature. The Irishman won’t be released for a few more weeks, so the jury’s still out on the movie’s fate – but, judging by the trailer, it revives an old formula (Scorsese + Robert De Niro = crime film) without necessarily bringing anything new to the table (to the point that expensive special effects were used to make De Niro appear younger, as if there were a shortage of young male leads in Hollywood).

The most touching part of Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood comes through Booth and Dalton, who do seem to experience the end of an era (and of their marriage-like friendship) once Dalton ties the knot. It’s a form of emotional payoff, but it lacks magnitude. The film wants to encapsulate the loss of innocence, a perennial theme in fiction, but it stays on the surface (yes, those images of late-Sixties LA are stunning and impressively detailed, but they don’t provide the emotional heavy lifting the movie so desperately needs) and fails to pull us in.

Tarantino has, of course, a complicated history when it comes to female characters. Quite tellingly, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’s final twist doesn’t give Tate a chance to fight off her attackers. Instead, she’s blissfully unaware of the Manson clan’s murderous plot, while Booth and Dalton get to emerge as the heroes of the evening (goofy heroes, but heroes all the same). Tarantino’s knack for revisionism was a golden opportunity to put Tate in charge of her own narrative, but he chose not to go down that route. Instead, he let the male gaze take over his portrayal of the actor. That’s his right. It just makes his oeuvre a lot more boring when it doesn’t have to be.